By Juan Eduardo Leal Lara from Monterrey Nuevo Leon, Mexico.
In recent years, entrepreneurship has become one of the fastest growing social phenomena in the United States.
This economy accelerator is the result of the strong connection between government, industry, educational and research institutions. More now than ever before, the wave of entrepreneurship has touched all the segments of the working population. The strong communication that exists thanks to social media and the internet has even transferred this wave to other countries like Mexico, Brazil, India, Russia and China. The question is, how do we teach the next generation of tech entrepreneurs which nowadays they need to be ethical, environmental conscious and social responsible?
Markets around the world are nowadays extremely competitive. This has forced many nations around the world to teach and inspire young people to become entrepreneurs so they can deliver better products and solutions to the different markets every country cares about. To teach entrepreneurship means to teach how to manage risk, accept failure and believe in the process of “planning long term happiness.”
Unfortunately most schools have mainly two problems which must be dealt with before launching any entrepreneurship program.
First of all any school professor, mentor or tech coach should have a strong ethical education. The “make money” approach is no longer sufficient, and the idea of pure profit has lost its luster with much of the younger generations. These generations believe companies should focus on making the world a better place to live, solve social problems and promoting the culture of environmental care. Without these strong pillars entrepreneurship would be destined of being a guarantee of freedom and happiness for just a few people while compromising the stability and happiness of future generations.
The second problem many educational institutions have and can be seen mostly in developing countries like Mexico and Brazil is the lack of entrepreneurial expertise. Most of the mentors and coaches from these universities have never started a tech business. Tech incubators are managed by rich and influential people rather than by tech entrepreneurs. These universities should focus on gathering this expertise before they launch their programs.
Like mentoring in education, advisors are equally important in a start-up context, and not having a strong network of tech entrepreneurs with expertise on the subject is a guarantee of failure. Entrepreneurship has always been and will continue to change our daily lives. Teaching entrepreneurship should become one of the priorities of future education if countries around the world want to stay globally competitive. And perhaps just as importantly, translating entrepreneurial themes to develop new learning forms–including disruption, collaboration, and technology–remains a powerful approach to reform education.
To teach entrepreneurship means to cultivate the future. This suggests we must teach it beneath an umbrella of ethics while seeking expertise and counsel from the ones who have failed and succeeded before. This also serves to connect community members, facilitate collaboration, and suggest new reasons to learn academic and non-academic content.
Image attribution flickr user shanegloballanguagecenters; How Entrepreneurial Themes Translate To Education